Insomnia

It took me a bit longer than usual, but I got through it! I'm glad I stuck with it too, it ended up being quite the wild ride. Mr. King really sticks the landing on this one, and it had a lot of fun references to “It” and “The Dark Tower” for the fans.

All in all, a very good read and I definitely recommend it to Steven King fans.

Am rezonat cu personajul principal, deoarece trec prin aceeași situație în viață. Singura chestie ce nu mi-a plăcut a fost că mi s-a părut cam lungă și după standardele lui Stephen King. Foarte multe referințe legate de seria Dark Tower și IT. Cartea este o lectură aproape obligatorie pentru cei care citesc seria Dark Tower și pentru cine au citit-o va fi foarte interesantă. I liked the book, however it is very slow even for a Stephen King book. However, it has a lot of references to the Dark Tower series.

There are many people for whom the book “Insomnia” will serve as a cure for the titular condition. It's an 800 page book that takes about 150 pages to start making sense – the first quarter of the book is all strange goings-on with no exposition.
Our hero, an old man with a dying wife, begins loosing sleep and (he thinks) hallucinating. He can see auras around people, fields of light that change according to their mood and health and terminate in a long “balloon-string,” their soul. And if that's not strange enough, he starts seeing three little bald men dressed as surgeons, who go around snipping people's strings.
It's all very psychedelic and intriguing, but I can see someone giving up on the book before it really gets rolling. Which would be a shame, because the plot kicks in around page 150 and it's a heck of a ride, all the more enjoyable if you don't know what's coming.
Suffice to say that this is the multiverse-hopping, cosmic guru King of The Stand and It, not the bare-bones King of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and Running Man (I like ‘em both, if you were wondering). Insomnia is actually a better read than both The Stand and It, because it is more closely tied into the world as we know it. Most importantly, the characters are complex and believable, truly people worth knowing.
So if you've got the attention span and the physical strength to lift this book, definitely pick it up.

The plot of this book is great, the characters are great, and the climax is so much fun (and then annoying), but this book is just too damn long. My attention really started to wane around the 70% mark. The Dark Tower connections were a lot of fun and I'm a little confused why people don't commonly mention this book as one of King's fantasy novels because it fully is. It's not a horror book, it's fantasy.

The ending of this book does a thing that I hate a lot, that King has done before, that I can't get into because of spoilers, but most people will not be bothered by this because it's incredibly specific to me. Definitely recommend this one, should be more well known among King fans.

Do NOT listen to the audiobook. Just don't do it. Listen to anything else instead. Listen to traffic outside. Listen to the sounds of your stomach when you're hungry. Listen to your neighbors singing karaoke. Anything, besides this book. I didn't particularly love Eli Wallach's narration (very quiet and unemotive) but what really makes this a bad audiobook experience is the sound effects. Sweet lord, it is atrocious. There are no words to adequately convey how much I wanted to drive my car into a ravine every time I heard these damn noises. Think of a cat howling when you step on its tail, mixed with nails on a chalk board, a Nine Inch Nails song outro, and a person screaming from underwater and you have a vague approximation of the jarring noise this audiobook made every 11 minutes. I hate it.